lives are gold
by my cure on ice
Summary: dying is overrated. cho hakkai and the active pursuit of a ghost of a devil. [hakkaigojyo]


**Author's Notes**: because gonou was nineteen.

_I'm on my way back home now  
good lives are gold, like the oldest story  
will mine be told while I'm still young and horny?  
I know my role is to be all confusion  
set the clock back; we're not growing old  
_–"Good Lives," Eve 6  
"_Perhaps staying here spurred the epiphany of my sin. It's your hair and eyes, Gojyo-san. They strike me as the color of _blood_."_ –Cho Gonou_  
lives are gold_  
by Bethany Ten

_And it's the thing about you, that makes people sacrifice who they are for what they could become._

"_Ah, hell. Like I'm one to talk. I don't have anything important in my life. I guess I wouldn't really know."_

"……"

● ● ●

_And it's beautiful._

"_G-Gojyo?"_

"_Gimmie the wheel. I'll drive."_

"_Just get some s-sleep, Gojyo. I heard your ribs crack when I crashed into—"_

"_Leave me alone! Just gimmie the wheel."_

"…_All right. Um, thank you."_

● ● ●

_And it isn't because they fear becoming anything like you—because you would think along those lines, would you not?—_

"_Can't sleep?"_

"_Nope. The stars're too bright."_

"_I agree with you there. I just saw a shooting star for the first time in my life."_

"_Don't make a wish. That's too cliché."_

"_I guess I could wish for 'my family's health and safety.' Yes?"_

"_You an old man or somethin'? The monkey'd ask for some ridiculous list of foods. Lookit him…out like a light. Lucky punk."_

"_Don't wake him up."_

"_I wasn't gonna."_

"_To tell you the truth… I envy the fact that he can think of something to wish for so easily. I couldn't think of a thing."_

"_Well, yeah. That's because you don't have anything you _need _to wish for."_

"……_I think I see."_

● ● ●

—_but because they fear becoming anything you wouldn't like._

It is apple season when he is born, and he is born with age—without memories, only knowledge, and he loves the world for it. His neonatal ward is a monastery, sterile-walled and calculated, and he sweeps the asphalt and smiles at the Buddhists, and his earcuffs glimmer silver-slow in the autumn sun.

He adjusts to himself as budding children are wont to do—gradually, but patiently. He studies his movements and the belligerent twitch of his fingers. His hand darts out as his toes curl, his muscles like coiled springs, and he dances with birds, mostly, birds and broomsticks, sightless to the resident monks, and he palms baby cardinals as soon as he learns he is capable of doing so. They sing in the chasm of his closed hand, and when his fingers fall limp they fly skyward, up, up, up, towards the sun. His eyes follow.

His monocle bends and refracts sunlight, and he cups his brow with his palm. He feels swift and skilled with bird-feathers blue and cool resting atop his lifeline, and his eyelids slide low, and he is unsmiling.

● ● ●

_To the Chinese, red means virtue, happiness, fire, luck._

He wakes up in a bed with no lumps and no condoms beneath the mattress and tastes vertigo, and it tastes like coffee, bitter and black, and the tinkle of beans in a grinder blares in and out of his consciousness before leaving completely, like the tinkle of music boxes when loving hands pull the lid shut. The sun thaws his hands and he twitches his fingers, his belligerent fingers, just to reassure himself that he is reallytrulygenuinely alive.

He takes a ten-minute bath and thinks how he absolutely, positively cannot remain long, and thinks it more loudly as the swish of robes accompanies brisk footsteps, and wonders if Sanzo has been appointed to any more mass murderers, and pointedly does not wonder how well-hidden those murderers are. If they are sheltered, they have a caretaker, because someone has to hold their hand as they dangle from the brink of insanity.

(Without a grip, one can't dangle, see, and he has never been good at finding grips on his own. He scrabbles and fumbles, and, honestly, sometimes the blackness is so all-encompassing it hurts, it hurts.)

Sanzo, he recalls, does not necessarily have to be appointed to a mass murderer to be simply. Gone. This particular monastery is by no means Sanzo's home and by lesser means Sanzo's sanctuary. Sanzo is homeless to the world, and Sanzo is home to Goku, and they are somewhere, and he is here and has nowhere to go.

"_The gods don't save anyone,"_ Sanzo had said.

In a past life, though, he distinctly recalls having been saved by a devil, once, and he finds himself incapable of ascertaining as to whether that makes Sanzo wrong or right. Devils and gods, repentance is equal-opportunity.

He droops like a lilting flower over the broom and chokes.

● ● ●

_To the Indians, red is soldiers, purity, and life._

He is a good man now where he might once have been a bad man.

Things are stark, and his monocle still is not enough. His vision as a whole is obscenely better than it ever was, more fixated on movement as opposed to color, the gentle throb of a blade of grass in the wind. His left eye even detects the skittering movements of a throng of ants gathered in the sifting dirt, categorically determines what lives and what does not, and, if he squints, he sees colors like auras cradling living things, smoky whorls of _chi_. His right eye, however, is determinedly human. The diviners of his fate suppose it's better this way—an unsubtle reminder of what he once was.

He supposes it's better this way for an entirely different reason. It sees little, which is undoubtedly better than having it see everything.

The monks smile back, but they talk as though his right ear is deaf. They talk about how he smells like blood, and he thinks they have never smelt blood before—he smells like monastery soap, earthy and utterly honest. He has suds beneath his fingernails and he is scrubbing, scrubbing the red away, and it returns at night, and he scrubs and scrubs and scrubs until his upturned palms are raw, skinless sinew.

He almost gives up every time, but the red simply. Cannot stay.

He rinses his hands from fingertip to the slope of his wrist, but he never forgets.

● ● ●

_To Genjyo Sanzo, red is just a color._

He eats his lunch (beans and vegetables divided into neat, separate lumps) beneath the trees and it's like crouching in the eye of a soft, kaleidoscopic storm, the way the leaves gather around his tilted form. The branches fracture the reach of the sunlight alongside the heathery flocks of storm-cloud on high, and he studies the quiet as it teems around him, takes refuge in it. He stretches his arms and his legs and eats slowly, adamantly retaining some weakness, because weakness is what made him this way, and he can lie to himself for a little while longer.

He takes two sips of his tea before pouring the rest at the base of the balding tree, and he makes a note to read about what does and does not agree with these sorts of trees, especially with the oncoming threat of winter. They will die in months to come, and he is determined it will not come to pass by his hand.

Little boys linger in the courtyards and are gone in heartbeats, and they remind him of squirrels, scurrying about, always with something to do or accomplish. He thinks how nice it is, to be in such a dreamlike state—however conscious—to hesitate amidst the falling leaves, and he wants to tell them to treasure the in-betweens, the way their clothes rustle silken-soft in the breeze. They should wrap it around their childish fingers as a reminder.

He and his fingers are just a handful of days old, and he and his fingers are also nineteen.

Sometimes, he just wants to paint, or draw, and he pictures it in his head—palettes and spinning wheels. Shade and stroke, black ink defining angles and shoulders and the silken tissue that encompasses scars, and maybe—maybe, just for the feel, a needle threaded through the finger, for the color, because there are some shades of red simply beyond the palette's capacity to attain. He could smear his bleeding finger up, for a sharp arc of hairline, and down, cast over smudgy claws of scars, up, down, up and down and away. A blot of blood for either iris, and a blot of ink for either pupil, and a bit of thinking for every misgiving.

He's never been an artist, though, as far as he knows. Nothing like creativity collects at the pores in his knuckles, but sometimes he just needs to believe.

● ● ●

_I remember you wanted me—_

The days shorten and he is gone so quickly and so quietly they wonder if he ever truly existed. They are quick to jump to conclusions, but nothing so eventful has occurred so as to assign him the label of "blessing" or "curse".

He left one set of footprints, mud-tracked and mud-etched, leading from the basins to the naked, gnarled trees in the courtyard. He left scattered clumps of choppy hair in the sink, and they all turn on the faucet and watch the strands crumble down the drain. The hair disappears alongside their memories of him.

● ● ●

—_to think about it for—_

He wears a turtleneck and walks and walks and walks. He pulls his jacket more tightly around his tilted form and walks and walks and walks. He pinches his limiters and pointedly does not consider the option of hunting the distinctive smell of Hi-Lites, stark against the chill air. (He thinks about the way your hands cover the lower sect of your face when you light up.) _You smoke_, he thinks, _you smoke_, and the smell of Hi-Lites intermingle with the scent of gourmet coffee. He walks.

He has seen purgatory, and he has lived it. It is a monastery, russet roofs and crinkling scriptures and old men living in denial. It is the limbo between human and _youkai_, and though he has long since crossed the line, he keeps glancing back, as though there is still something to learn, something to be bundled up and stowed away.

He is not a man, and he knows this.

They say that once one leaves, one can never go back home again.

_But I can_, he thinks, and he shouldn't believe it anymore, but he _does_. He stretches his name high and tall like a barrier, and the _youkai_ must all fall behind the eight-shaped line, and he presses his back to it and counts his individual cells as they heal. It's scar tissue, residue, but it's skin and it's skin and it's _skin_ and he sleeps early, tentatively, ensuring that tomorrow will come, and it does, and (in this life, in this life, not the past or the next or _ohgodkanan_) tomorrow's never let him down before.

And the _youkai_ are a dime a dozen, scattered like so many tears on a blank canvas landscape, and there are men behind that barrier, mortal but immortal figments of the soul, but the sound of the possibility of _healing_ drowns out their snarls, and he turns away from their scrabbling hands. And tomorrow's never let him down before.

His footsteps thud dully against foliage and mud and rain-sodden dirt. They echo in his ears. He walks because he has nothing to lose, and he has something to gain, and something is never far from everything.

● ● ●

—_more than just a moment._

He stands at the edge of a no-name village, and the doctor is passing by, all dust-filtered bleached coat and wispy hairs like snipped threads of cotton, and the doctor looks mildly surprised before waving at him with this jovial smile, and he disregards the gesture completely. He does not know that man. He never has.

● ● ●

_Taboo._

(And he sees something, something unfamiliar and familiar all at once, impossibly redred and impossibly beautiful, sauntering listlessly down a listless road, and something in his heart mends just a simple, quiet fraction, and that fraction is _growing_ and that fraction is something he is completely powerless to stop.) He sees _you_.

You walk quickly enough to break hearts, but slowly enough so as to not portray any sort of hurry, and your cigarette is unlit, a cylindrical collective of ashes and nicotine and nothing that will keep you alive for very much longer. You either live a life or you don't, and you prefer to think of yourself as the only one in the in-between, though you know that's a selfish-selfless lie, but that's mainly because people think everything is infrared for you due to the muddled hues of your eyes, and they're wrong. Grayscale—white, gray, black.

And sometimes, nowadays, with the wind cooling the back of your neck, you see misty pastels you might be able to pass off as color, and you—you lock those things up and keep them outside of you where you can continue to see them. You _need_ them. They forcibly open your eyes, and it's fine, you need that because your eyes can't stay lidded forever.

The girls lie to you so beautifully and they rap their knuckles on your sternum and marvel at the rocky-lean state of your abdomen, and you miss the meaninglessness of everything the way you miss sleeping in alleyways in dignified crouches—with quiet relish. Brick-walled condominiums were broad and ultimately unforgiving, and with your shoulders hunched and your head buried in your knees your hair almost looked like a sect of wall, but only when it was particularly dark out. You did not know if you would ever know if it was ever enough.

They ask you, "Is there some other woman?" and you say you _wish_, and you do not know if you will ever know if that is what you really wish or want, and that's fine, too.

You think, _Right._

You think, _It's not like anything's changed._

You think that's okay.

Beginnings feel like any other day, and you know this now, except they flow a tad more smoothly and you want that flow to consume you wholly. For all you know, it might take you by the hand and lead you away.

(And he pauses amidst the teeming bazaar, the parallel lines that converge somewhere in the mottled horizon, and people bump into them and he shoves them aside. He _looks_ at you, really looks at you, and his breath hitches someplace in his throat, and your hair is so impossibly red and he thinks, _Oh_, and flushes, because it _is_ a horrible trim job and he would like to even out those ends for you. Your hair was long once, feathery and cast over your cheekbones and still red, and he hopes he will know it gray and worn, a passing, misty, pinkish color, perhaps, the antennae-like hairs drooping like slackened shoulders.

It would be worth anything, to catalogue that, that shade of gray.)

"These are such a beautiful red," he says, "aren't they?"

(And the hand holding the apple is shaking, the movement sheltered by breeze and the perceptible throb of his sleeves, and you were so _close_ and he found himself inhaling as deeply as he could without making it obvious—beginnings smell like tobacco and apple season and musk, and he wants to gather it all in his lungs and never exhale, never again. You're his fresh air now, and no one will ever forgive you if you forget that.)

And you _know fear_, the only sort of fear you tasted when your brother breeched your mother's pulse, the gut-twisting anticipation and the utter terror and you stare at him, dumb and deaf but certainly not blind, and you've never seen that genuinely delightful, if tremulous, smile latticing his too-pretty lips, the apprehension twisting his too-pretty eyes and you think, _Yes._

You think this could be enough. This could be the one that leads you away.

"Gojyo."

_It means little to me, then, aside from everything—aside from you, by the windowsill, watching the night sky, wishing your life away._


End file.
